NATURAL and CULTURAL FEATURES of MONMOUTH COUNTY

what is now the Hall of Records (Blair, 1993; MCDPI, 2005). By 1758, the Lenape (Delaware)
Indians that were still living in the County were being relocated to the first Indian reservation in
the US, at Indian Mills in Burlington County (Colts Neck Historical Society, 1965).
In 1775, a raiding party from Portland Point (Atlantic Highlands and Middletown) boarded the
English ship the “London” in Sandy Hook Bay and threw its cargo of tea overboard to protest the
closing of the port of Boston by the British following the Boston Tea Party two years earlier
(Boyd, 2004). In 1777, the British massacred American troops in the County’s first engagement
of the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Navesink Hills, near Hartshorne Woods and Highway
36 in Highlands (Boyd, 2004). In 1778 the Battle of Monmouth was fought in Manalapan in one
of the largest battles of the American Revolution, and is memorialized at Monmouth Battlefield
Park off Rt. 33, and at “Molly Pitcher’s Well” (actually a spring) along Rt. 522 west of Freehold
(MCDPI, 2005). The 12-mile long English army retreated to New York over an Indian trail in
Freehold and Colts Neck that is now Dutch Lane Road. Following the ridgeline of the Mount
Pleasant Hills, they marched on Kings Highway East in Middletown to cross a pontoon bridge
built of anchored, planked boats over a now-closed inlet by Plum Island for embarkation from
Sandy Hook (Boyd, 2004; Colts Neck Historical Society, 1965).
The first iron works in New Jersey was constructed around 1674 in Tinton Falls, Monmouth
County; the industry peaked after the war of 1812 until about 1844, when transporting coal as
well as richer ores of iron from Pennsylvania and other states west of NJ became more cost
effective (Forman, 1998). During the Industrial Revolution of the 19 th century, the first railroads
helped to develop seaside resorts such as Highlands (Waterwitch), Long Branch, and Asbury
Park, doubling the population of Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, and Cape May counties from
55,700 in 1850 to 111,000 by 1885 (Roberts and Youmans, 1993). In 1870, the first section of
the Atlantic City boardwalk was opened. Steamboats brought tourists from New York to the
railroad pier at Atlantic Highlands, where they could connect with the New Jersey Southern
Railroad and cross a “scissors” bridge between Highlands and Sandy Hook to towns along the
way to Long Branch (the City of Keansburg ferry operated until 1968) (APP, 2006a; Gallo,
2000). A 2000 foot long pier was constructed at Cedar St. in Keyport, and steamboats traveled
up Matawan Creek to wharves and warehouses that had existed along Lake Lefferts as far as Rt.
516 in Matawan before it silted in (Gallo, 2000; Kisk, 2006). Although most of the County that
was not along the coast still remained farmland, its transition to suburbia accelerated when the
majority of the 164-mile Garden State Parkway was completed by 1954, having begun
construction in Union County a year after the end of World War II (NYCroads.com, 2005).
OCEAN
NJ bordered Morocco 245 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, when the
Appalachian and Anti-Atlas mountains that are now in Africa were a single range that may have
been higher than the Himalayas (Gallagher, 2003; Wikipedia, 2009). This lasted about 75
million years, until the supercontinent Pangaea began to rip apart (Gallagher, 2003). As lava
formed into the basalts of the Watchung Mountains in Somerset and Passaic, and igneous
intrusions cooled into the columns of the Palisades, the water surrounding Pangaea rushed in to
fill the rift between the new continents, creating the Atlantic Ocean (Gallagher, 2003).
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